QI comedian Alan Davies keeps audience fizzing

LAURIE ATKINSON

Last updated 10:14 12/02/2013

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Should you see people today either pursing their lips and puffing out air like a clam or pushing their closed lips forward as far as they can and with their teeth clamped and speaking with an Aussie accent then you'll know they were at the Opera House on Friday night.

It took Alan Davies 25 minutes to get to the topic of the evening: life is pain. He spent that time warming up the audience with some traditional but often very funny ad-libbing and chitchat, but it was, in a sense, a complete waste of time. Before he casually wandered on stage, the full house was fizzing with anticipation, and when he appeared he was greeted with a hero's welcome.

One of the first questions he was asked was, where was Stephen Fry. The genial star of Jonathan Creek and QI said it was just him tonight and Fry had been locked in the basement where he was probably reading a Latin dictionary.

However, on a couple of occasions, the eternal fall guy of QI did show all that knowledge on QI hadn't completely passed him by, which earned him rounds of applause.

Life is Pain comes from the reply that a 6-year-old girl gave to her mother when she was being ticked off for some misdemeanour. And Alan Davies shows us that although life is pain, even such things as the name Upper Hutt, Kiwi accents, lesbian dogs and his coping with his baby son's toilet habits can be side-splitting.

Like all good comedians, he keeps interrupting himself and going off on tangents but always returns to his story, whether he is sounding off about Facebook, his sex life at drama school, or wearing a uniform at his school that didn't have uniforms, which was all tied in with the name of the shop in an Essex town that his father bought the uniform from.

The audience was kept laughing for more than 90 minutes and left as they arrived, fizzing.